Gammon substitutes

The genuine equivalent, and what you should ask a butcher for outside Britain and Ireland. It is the same brine cure, so it simmers, glazes and slices exactly like gammon. A shoulder cut is fattier and more marbled than a leg, which makes it more forgiving and better for shredding but harder to carve into tidy slices.

Best for

Christmas or Easter centrepiece, boiled and glazed joints, ham sandwiches, pea and ham soup, Sunday roast

Look for the word raw, fresh, uncooked or cook before eating on the label. In the US the phrase to look for is city ham, which is wet-cured, as opposed to a dry-cured country ham, which is far saltier and needs long soaking.

Widely available and completely workable, with two consequences. First, it is already cooked, so simmering it makes it stringy and dry. Second, you lose the cooking liquor, which in a gammon recipe is the base for pea and ham soup or for the gravy, and you lose the chance to draw excess salt out.

Best for

glazed ham with no fuss, cold cuts, feeding a crowd, when time is short

Score the fat, stud with cloves, brush with a mustard and brown sugar or honey glaze and roast at 200C / 400F for 20 to 30 minutes until the glaze bubbles and darkens. Cooked hams are usually saltier and finer textured, so go easy on salt everywhere else in the meal.

In Britain a bacon joint is the same cure applied to the shoulder or collar rather than the leg, so it behaves almost identically. It is fattier and tastes a little more emphatically of bacon, which most people find an improvement in a boiled joint served with parsley sauce and cabbage.

Best for

boiled bacon and cabbage, pea and ham soup, braises, Irish and British classics

Collar and shoulder joints have more connective tissue, so give them 10 to 15 minutes per 500 g longer than you would a gammon leg. They can also be saltier, so taste the simmering water after twenty minutes and change it if it makes you wince.

Excellent when gammon is being used as a seasoning rather than as the main event. It brings salt and smoke to a pot of soup, beans or greens, but it is much leaner, so the broth ends up thinner and less silky without pork fat. The meat shreds rather than slices.

Best for

pea and ham soup, split pea and lentil soups, braised greens and cabbage, bean pots, halal and pork-free cooking

Because it has no fat cap it will not glaze or roast like a joint, so do not use it as a centrepiece. Add a tablespoon of butter or oil to the pot to make up for the missing richness.

The cheapest way to get gammon's flavour into a pot. It gives more collagen than a gammon joint, so the broth turns genuinely silky, and the flavour is deeper and more concentrated. What you do not get is much meat, and none of it slices.

Best for

pea and ham soup, stocks and broths, terrines and ham hock salad, braised beans and lentils

One hock yields perhaps 200 to 300 g of picked meat, so it is a flavour ingredient rather than a portion of meat. Simmer 2 to 3 hours until the meat falls off the bone.

The honest least-good option, and worth understanding before you commit. Brining fresh pork in salt, sugar and aromatics for 24 hours gets you seasoned, juicy pork, but not ham. Without curing salts the meat cooks to a pale greyish pink rather than rosy, and the flavour is roast pork rather than the tangy cured depth gammon has.

Best for

when no cured pork is available, people avoiding nitrites, roast dinners where ham flavour is not the point

Use 60 g salt and 30 g sugar per litre of water, chill and submerge for 24 hours, then rinse, pat dry and roast to 63C / 145F. Do not attempt a nitrite cure without following a tested recipe exactly, and treat brined fresh pork as raw meat throughout, refrigerating it and cooking it fully.